What Is Blockchain?

Blockchain builds a growing list of unalterable records (called blocks) that are linked together to form a chain and securely distributed among participants. It allows organizations that might not fully trust each other to agree on a single, distributed source of truth.

Blockchain minimizes the cost and delays of using third-party intermediaries for financial transactions. It also eliminates manual, error-prone processes, and information redundancy.

Blockchain Challenges for Enterprises

Blockchain has the potential to fundamentally transform global businesses across multiple industries. It enables a trusted business network to transact directly over a peer-to-peer network—without the delays and cost of third parties—while still ensuring the validity and integrity of the transactions.

Hyperledger and Blockchain

Hyperledger is an open source project started by the Linux Foundation to advance cross-industry collaboration of blockchain technologies. As part of its commitment to help enterprises realize the benefits of blockchain, Oracle has joined this global effort. By leveraging open source and maintaining interoperability with core protocols, Oracle will enable customers to drive the direction and pace of integration across business systems.

Every node in a blockchain independently verifies and processes every transaction

Blockchain-powered transactions and data are extremely fault-tolerant due to their built-in redundancy

Updates are agreed upon by the participants before they are committed, as opposed to a typical database environment where the updates are committed by each party and then reconciled

The overall performance of a blockchain is near real-time because there are no delays from a central clearing house or reconciliation processing